Poetry Kanto 2012

Editor's Note
Alan Botsford

The secret of poetry is cruelty, kindness, suffering, redemption, transcendence. But when the boat comes ashore, at which mooring will you anchor? You may find many paths or metaphors conducive to the search that puts more body into your mind. (Though words, I have heard, have silent modes mysterious as vibrations felt across space.) Yes, you tell me what this means, I’ll tell you what this dreams–for the dream-making apparatus wants meaning out of the way in order for images to play and word energy healthily to enter your body.

When you open a book, the world is like that. Forests of all-you-see shapes that, squinting, you slowly make out the names for, and pronounce, word by word, line by line, page by page, each sound a menagerie of relations you never knew was there and is not, no not, bound by covers front and back.

The incoming messes–the choice is always yours–that must be dealt with, dispatched willy-nilly, and other messes kept from spilling over, gods willing, struggles for love, energy, power, you name it–creatively transformed by artists and poets to the tune of outgoing messages to the culture, this universally the case, always is and has been, for as long as culture has been wrought, and wars been fought, and love been sought…

If the truth of poetry is not the truth of history, as poet Philip Levine has said, the dark bruise of history painful to the touch–living more fully in the wake of that ache?–like the wound’s line between fatal and vital still must be walked in order to say what we can, in order to be what we can, in order to write what we can, in order to love what we cannot bear not to, as the moon looks in through the open blinds to give comfort, and more than that, to reorient the sleepers’ dreams–for to be starry-eyed is to be unblinking in whatever you face, but not unmoved by what you see.

So stay tuned for the world, from the bottom up. In dreams, as with everything else, there’s wheat and chafe. Not everything speaks to you. But when it does, it speaks out loud and clear of the nature-named world once inhabited by antenna-ed (not attenuated) human beings below the roof-topped skies heard across multi-channels, spectrums late and early of makings from tree-bark, stardust, vital signs under the breathings, the containments, numbers felt not amassed, facts searching not accumulated, music re-grounding not recorded.

Poetry accomplishes its work thus. It knows all about sparrowdynamics in the jet stream, high and low, of imagination. The moral web of the universe is spun by poets after all.

CONTENTS

Arai Takako

Ito Hiromi

Yoko Danno

Adele Ne Jame

Mark Murphy

Paula Bohince

Peggy Aylsworth

Ann Fisher-Wirth

Poetry Kanto 2011

Editor's Note
Alan Botsford

We are in the midst… of what? Transition? Flux? Apocalypse? Hasn’t the world always been in flux? What is different about our present 3/11 reality, and what do poets have to offer our understanding–or our striving for it–as we meet the challenges ahead?

Poets who work in the spaces between past and present, between imagination and reality, between history and eternity, between original and translation are bridge-builders. In the poem that is a bridge between, then, where composites of new composures rise out of old composts for the breaking of bread between old and new, let the 108 kinds of sins or desires in Buddhist thought meet the 108 suitors of Homer’s Penelope. In the poem that is a bridge between where out of our coming together and coming apart are a death throes and a birth cry, let us settle for the irrepressible and the undeniable lying down with a loneliness and a flawed, wounded happiness. In the poem that is a bridge between where what’s felt by the body matters to the mind and speaks to the heart one green thought at a time, let us make for the body of our first great love, and remember– humility and hell go together to preserve good humor.

For the journey’s end to an old storyline has come here, to a land of secrets (don’t worry, misunderstandings understand you) where waiting for the “happily ever after” confirms the absurdity of falling in love–the “You love me, I love you” bottom line. Put in perspective, it’s a vocation and a risk we’re talking about, along with promises kept, past the distractions and diversions, in a drama whose casting seems heaven-sent and whose players tap into the moment that, gone but not forgotten, gives birth to a debt nobody frets over– over which one sleeps easy (for a price).

See? No longer counting the cost oceans apart but charting one’s own course deep in a dream, payola-ing on the wild side for a sea-change of words up close and personal, that undarkens outlook and opens doors to answering the question not of how to live (who says enough is enough?) but of what it takes to keep dreaming.

For words are ash unless dreams be real, and made flesh. Every word, if heart-centered, is a myth to live by; wherever you are, horizons not lost. History holds us all accountable. For that, we should be grateful. You can’t discard it. Events like 3/11 last beyond our past. Time is not only linear, it’s cyclical, which puts, and keeps, certain otherwise unavailable energies in play. The poet lowers the arrowhead of his vision to aim at targets he’s already embedded himself in. Once hit, the heart either contracts or expands.

After certain events, then–including The Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011– a new energy from the universe churns what is collective into what is individual to produce the mix Jung called “collective unconscious” which we all share. The history we carry is not just our own. What worries and gnaws at us, like a dog a bone, is all of ours, as shown by the soul’s call to human compassion.

CONTENTS

Ito Hiromi

Jeffrey Angles

Libby Hart

Geneva Bronwyn Hargreaves

William I. Elliott

Gavin Bantock

Sally Bliumis-Dunn

Gregory Dunne

Leila Fortier

Niels Hav

Changming Yuan

William Heyen

Michael Sowder

Adele Ne Jame

Yumiko Tsumura

Jane Hirshfield

POETRY KANTO - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetry_Kanto


Poetry Kanto (ポエトリ関東) is a Japan-based, English and Japanese bilingual poetry print journal founded and originally edited by award-winning translator William I. Elliott and internationally acclaimed poet Shuntarō Tanikawa. The annual journal, currently edited by Alan Botsford, is published by the Kanto Poetry Center at Kanto Gakuin University in Yokohama, Japan and showcases modern and contemporary Japanese poetry in English translation, as well as contemporary English-language poetry from the United States, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia, Wales, South Africa, Hong Kong, Canada, Ireland, and other countries. Bridging East and West, Poetry Kanto features "outstanding poetry that navigates the divide of ocean and language from around the world."^[1]

Goals[edit]

Poetry Kanto devotes itself to introducing Japanese poets and English-speaking poets to a wide audience at home in Japan and abroad. It aims to promote dialogue between Japan and the English-speaking world. Each issue features an in-depth look at poets from both sides of the cultural divide, setting up a blend of cultures and traditions unique among literary publications. The hope is for readers to step outside their limited cultural spheres and engage in cross-cultural dialogue for a rebirth at the crossroads of culture and imagination.

In a recent interview, editor Alan Botsford said, "I feel very fortunate… to play a role in a cross-cultural mission as wall as literary exploration. I think cultural identity and that struggle, for many people across the globe, the struggle of cultural identity per se and also between cultures, speaks to what Poetry Kanto tries to offer. As editor, I envision Poetry Kanto as a transformative space where poetry’s insights are made available for, and can engage the entire range of, cultures, not just getting into the cultural mix but adding to it, enriching it, fermenting it beyond our ideas of Japaneseness and Americanness."^[2]

History[edit]

The journal's origins can be traced back to the founding of the Kanto Poetry Center in 1968 by Professor Emeritus William I. Elliott, when he proposed a four-fold center to be housed at Kanto Gakuin University—the first of its kind and scope in Japan, to include a library of contemporary poetry, a poetry journal, regular poetry readings in the university, and an annual poetry conference.^[3] The Center, modeled after American counterparts, was originally directed by Kanto Gakuin's Prof. Naoyuki Yagyū and his colleagues, Kazuo Kawamura and William I. Elliott, and has over the years sought, in Elliott's words, "to promote the health of poetry both as an art and a discipline within university structures."^[4] The Center has carried on by the cooperation and funding of successive university presidents, from 1968 to the present.

The Center has held poetry readings with many readers, including Shuntarō Tanikawa, Naoko Kudo, Masayo Koike, Arthur Binard, and Kisako Ryō. It also successfully launched the bilingual journal Poetry Kanto, and continued holding its annual conference until 2005, when the founding editors retired. Over the years, the Center's annual conference, or Summer Institute Program, featured among the non-Japanese poet-readers-lecturers and seminar teachers James Kirkup, Gary Snyder, Harry Guest, William Stafford, Denise Levertov, W.S. Merwin, Seamus Heaney, Les Murray and Jon Silkin, with the preponderance of the logistics of the conference carried out by Kazuo Kawamura.

Poetry Kanto was first published in 1968 to present to the participants of the Kanto Poetry Summer Institute Program. The second issue appeared in 1970, after which a dozen-year hiatus followed. The journal resumed publication again in 1984 and has been in continuous publication ever since, with Elliott and Tanikawa at the English and Japanese editorial helms, respectively. As of 2005, issue number 21, the "baton" was passed to co-editors Alan Botsford and Nishihara Katsumasa with an advisory board consisting of Shuntarō Tanikawa, Kazuo Kawamura and William I. Elliott, but in 2011, issue number 27, Botsford became sole editor.^[5]

In 2005 the look of Poetry Kanto changed, with the professional designer/publisher's services shifting from Tokyo to Kamakura, the headquarters of the small but growing literary publisher Minato-no-hito (literally "a guy at the harbor", taken from the title of Tarō Kitamura’s poem).

Featured Poets[edit]

Since 2005, Poetry Kanto has featured a wide and diverse range of poets such as Gwyneth Lewis, Ilya Kaminsky, Beth Ann Fennelly, Vijay Seshadri, Harryette Mullen, Ellen Bass, Rigoberto González, Ayukawa Nobuo, Tarō Kitamura, Akira Tatehata, Shuntarō Tanikawa, Gregory Orr, Michael Sowder, Ann-Fisher Wirth, Sarah Arvio, Michele Leggott, Saburō Kuroda, Rin Ishigaki, Kiyoko Nagase, Toriko Takarabe^[6], Inuo Taguchi, Hiroshi Kawasaki, Mari L’Esperance, Ekiawah Adler-Belendez, William Heyen, Linda Ann Strang, J.P. Dancing Bear, Yasuhiro Yotsumoto, Kiriu Minashita, Chimako Tada, Masayo Koike, Naoko Kudō, Ryūichi Tamura, Kenji Miyazawa, Maiko Sugimoto, Junzaburō Nishwaki, Irene McKinney, Jane Hirshfield, Shinjirō Kurahara, Ryō Kisaka, Alicia Ostriker, Judy Halebsky, Hiromi Itō, Jeffrey Angles, Takako Arai, Libby Hart, Gregory Dunne, Niels Hav, William Heyen, and Adele Ne Jame.

In addition, the work of translators such as Jeffrey Angles, Hiroaki Sato, William I. Elliott & Kazuo Kawamura, Katsumasa Nishihara, Oketani Shogo & Leza Lowitz, Marianne Tarcov, Mitsuko Ohno & Beverly Curran, Leith Morton, Takako Lento, Hidetoshi Tomiyama & Michael Pronko, Arthur Binard & Ryō Kisaka, Hosea Hirata, and Ayako Takahashi have in recent years been featured in the pages of Poetry Kanto.

Submissions[edit]

Submissions to Poetry Kanto—poems written in English or Japanese poems in English translation—are accepted from December through May. The journal contains 50 poems or 130 pp. per issue and seeks exciting, well-crafted contemporary poetry in English, and also encourages and publishes high-quality English translations of modern and emerging Japanese poets. All translations must be accompanied by the original poems.^[7]

References[edit]

1. ^ Robert Lee Brewer (ed.), 2012 Poet's Market, pp. 340-41.
2. ^ Kiyo, 2012.
3. ^ William I. Elliott, "Poetry Center Inaugurated," Japan Calling, American Baptist Foreign Mission Society (1969).
4. ^ William I. Elliott, "Miscellaneous Notes on the Kanto Poetry Center and Poetry Kanto," Unpublished manuscript, Aug 9, 1993
5. ^ Jane Joritz-Nakagawa, "An Interview with Poetry Kanto Co-editors Alan Botsford and Katsumasa Nishihara," Yomimono (Volume 16). May 24, 2012.
6. ^ Rollmann, Hans (1 April 2019). "'Heaven and Hell' Offers a Powerful Child's-eye View of Japanese Colonialism". PopMatters. Retrieved 29 April 2019.
7. ^ Poetry Kanto Center (2005). "Poetry Kanto". Kanto Gakuin University. Retrieved 2012-07-02.

External links[edit]

Reviews of Poetry Kanto Issues[edit]

• "Poetry Across Continents" by Stephanie Harper in The Review Review, 2010
• "Pages: A review of Poetry Kanto 2010" in The Compulsive Reader, 2010
• Review by Sima Rabinowitz in New Pages, 2010

Related Websites[edit]

• Poetry Kanto Poetry Kanto
• Poetry Kanto page on blog by Alan Botsford
• Personal blog by Poetry Kanto editor Alan Botsford

Poetry Kanto 2010

Editor's Note
Alan Botsford

Who has not seen the darkening shadow moving across the face of our days, or heard the snarl and growl of the age resounding in our ears, the beast rearing up out of our forgetfulness and growing insatiable by our blindness, and the stories we tell ourselves but the innumerable, subtle variations of what we are capable of forgetting, that flies in the face of the present–whose simple grace of the mundane, like home, hardly knows where it is from? For the bad news is all there is sometimes–the collapse of this state, the death of that heart–that one wonders how to turn the page or to stop reading altogether and make for the stillness, the centering silence where a music reigns, clear and crystalline, a reed belt tied round the waist of the spirit that lifts it past the old pains, the present agonies, towards the deep blue waters of tears shed and gathered into a living stream, past all moaning and weeping, past all cursing and quarreling, past all human dilemmas, towards the latent and possible, the play of style, neither slow and calm nor quick and violent, merely simple, homelike, common in an artless, expressioned and textured turn, intending neither to arouse and provoke, nor put nature’s manifest booty on display per se, merely remaining, continuing (for a long time?) as psyche continues, fluttering into roles, particular and private, influential and public, oscillating in a circuit of you (“Farewell”?) and me (“Welcome!”) (“Peace!”) in accord with our natures interchanging, weak to strong and back again, aviating and slipping separately through the air of our animal breath, divinely possessed of the smallest and the least, the last and the lost who do not look back nor sniff downwind for future portents, just excluding less and less and drawing deeper the draught of air taken into the lungs, and exhaling to where all is left undone, a blank account, a hidden surplus, an unspent inheritance, an unrecorded history, an uninhabited estate, yet all coming together and flowing out as a tendency, an interval, a trace, sleepy and languid, yet bright and lively, the lyric voice noting its concession to whatﾕs next and ever so…

To hunt for traces of places and faces, then, storied deep down under the bed of thunder between whose lightning-ed sheets–crack!–we once to the sacred journey awoke, faith and doubt our companions ever since, read daily and throughout each night where we hear spoken to us the I that is essentially the you you thought you left behind but remains a gift to the we we are –O unbelievably still– as the days wheeling the words back into mystic chords where begin acts of culture as facts in nature, out of words worlding us towards and away from each other, heavenly bodies orbiting in space, stars, planets, suns, galaxies spinning, wheeling fast holding motions in the depths of the earth, soil and magma and lava swirling underneath as molten masses hurling up these sounds, these words ample, impartial, spoken and heard in the heartbeat and bloodlines coursing through veins and arteries that keep us connected, dazzled, and in the wheel of time.

To remain at the surface of discourse telling us what we already know, however, is one thing. To go down and then come back up again telling us what we don’t know is another thing entirely. If tears flow sometimes, go with it. If fears glow at other times, walk beside them. Show your compassion and forgiveness, say how much you understand that your undoing is not their doing when, undone, you’re merely a shadow of yourself on the trail to a new body, loved into words, embraced as a phrase and stage at which we, from this intercourse, find we have everything in common, even our deaths, save one thing. Which is why, to be honest, the real in you tries to reel otherness in, that catch it’s time now to let go of, to throw back into the deeps before the swells, looming large as stories, swallow you whole.

Yes, being seen through is family work, is how we fulfill ourselves in distributing resources and energy that takes us roaring back to where we started, fresh –though the expanding union of yesterday (proud & defiant), today (important as ever), and tomorrow (just around the corner, hanging on a promise) is still far from over.

But to be safe, let’s eye together (for now), those open spaces we can spy up ahead that no photo will capture, no sentence will enclose, that prime location resistant way way way down to a depth, dreams and all, of a lifetime.

CONTENTS

Kurahara Shinjiro

Ayukawa Nobuo

Kisaka Ryo

Alicia Ostriker

J.P. Dancing Bear

Katherine Riegel

Bill Wolak

Ginger Murchison

Temple Cone

Judy Halebsky

Yoko Danno

Poetry Kanto 2009

Editor's Note
Alan Botsford

This year Poetry Kanto celebrates its 25th year of publication. Its first 20 years, under the stewardship of founding editors William I. Elliott & Shuntaro Tanikawa, Poetry Kanto established itself as a vital part of Japan’s poetry scene, providing a showcase for internationally acclaimed poets from Japan and overseas. We hope readers would agree that the past five years has seen a maintaining of those standards not only by introducing poets from English-speaking nations such as Wales, New Zealand, South Africa and Hong Kong but also by broadening our venue to include emerging poets.

Meanwhile, the increase of the ranks of translators working to bring to light modern and contemporary Japanese poetries (beyond traditional verse-forms of haiku, tanka & renga) has continued apace. Contributing to recent issues of Poetry Kanto have been U.S.-based translators Sato Hiroaki, Takako Lento, Jeffrey Angles, and Marianne Tarcov, as well as Japan-based translators Kawamura Kazuo and William I. Elliott, Oketani Shogo and Leza Lowitz, Mitsuko Ohno and Beverly Curran, Tomiyama Hidetoshi and Michael Pronko, and Leith Morton, not to mention the newest U.S.-based contributor for this issue, Hosea Hirata, to all of whom we owe a debt of gratitude. Their efforts to express in English –as close to a ‘universal language’ as exists now–Japan’s unique modern and contemporary poetries play an important role, we believe, in finding creative new ways and artistic forms that explore what it means to meet the challenges of living humanely, non-violently, and responsibly in the ‘globalizing’ 21st century. The work of all Poetry Kanto’s contributors past, present and future can serve to remind readers of the world’s rich cultural patrimonies, together with how the poet’s vision is priceless, and how preserving acts of imagination is a trial of humanity.

For our 25th issue, then, Poetry Kanto offers a dazzling and diverse array of voices. Every necessary poem ever written, it seems to us, begs the question, Why poetry? And every such poem as found, we believe, in the following pages, can in myriad ways hint at a perennial answer.

CONTENTS

Tanikawa Shuntaro /谷川俊太郎

Sugimoto Maiko/ 杉本真維子

Nishiwaki Junzaburo /西脇順三郎

Irene McKinney

Miles B. Waggener

C.J. Sage

Carol Frith

Charles F. Thielman

Terri Brown-Davidson

Alan Botsford

Sankar Roy

Jane Hirshfield

Jane Hirshfield Reading--review by Alan Botsford

visiting poet Jane Hirshfield gives a reading at
Waseda University  Tokyo   March 28, 2009

Poetry readings are unpredictable affairs. The poet-performer sets the tone and mood for the audience to receive, interact with, and reflect on the power of words. If we feel reconnected to the power of language, rather than to the poet's ego, we feel grateful. Jane Hirshfield's reading and talk on translation yesterday at Waseda University gave cause for such gratitude. This Zen-trained poet brings a wealth of Buddhist perspectives to her historical imagination, as well as historical perspectives to her Buddhist-influenced imagination (see her prose work, Nine Gates). But if the measure of a poet lies in her ability to evoke the range and depth of earthly experience via words, Jane Hirshfield transcends both the Buddhist and the historical to touch, as poet, on the transforming effects of language itself. Her poetic voice evokes less Whitmanesque extravagances and vastnesses and more Dickinsonian qualifications and enigmas, which offered this listener much food for thought. She recounted the story of how, as an 8-year-old child, she fell in love with a book of haiku poems. It was a love, she pointed out, which she 'never lost'. 'Forebearance,' 'robustness,' 'resilience,' 'tenacity,' 'persistence'-- one imagines, after hearing the poet casually and repeatedly reference them, that these are not merely verbal abstractions that mark her aesthetic sensibility but in fact offer one-word precepts she lives her life by. Spending time in this poet's company for those two hours or so yesterday brought home the efficacy of the phrases she used to describe her love affair with ancient Japanese poetry: "They touched my heart. They woke me up."

-- Alan Botsford